Product Description

From an industry insider--a close look at high-performance, end-to-end switching solutions
Load balancers are fast becoming an indispensable solution for handling the huge traffic demands of the Web. Their ability to solve a multitude of network and server bottlenecks in the Internet age ranges from dramatic improvements in server farm scalability to removing the firewall as a network bottleneck. This book provides a detailed, up-to-date, technical discussion of this fast-growing, multibillion dollar market, covering the full spectrum of topics--from server and firewall load balancing to transparent cache switching to global server load balancing. In the process, the author delivers insight into the way new technologies are deployed in network infrastructure and how they work. Written by an industry expert who hails from a leading Web switch vendor, this book will help network and server administrators improve the scalability, availability, manageability, and security of their servers, firewalls, caches, and Web sites.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #623984 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

well written and thorough
This book is a very well written and nicely organised introduction to server load balancing. The author describes the basics of load balancing, including NAT, session persistence, and network architectures. A discussion on application-layer parsing was quite good. There is also a chapter on global server load balancing (including incorporating load-balancing into the authoritative DNS server) which I found to be very detailed and interesting.

Much of the book is centered on how to load balance TCP (and to a lesser extent UDP), and the author uses HTTP and FTP as his primary driving examples. Throughout the book, the author provides some insight regarding what approaches real companies use (e.g. "this method is what Foundry and Cisco uses."), which I liked very much. Also, the illustrations were plentiful (although a bit primitive-looking).

There are only a few negatives about this book. The english writing is a bit stilted at times, and the chapters on firewalls and caches were basically rehashes of earlier chapters. Finally, I was hoping the author would have provided more detail on the load-distribution heuristics (which server to choose) with more metrics and actual real-world results.

I found the book to be extremely well organised. You will not get lost while reading this book, but you will need a university-level understanding of TCP/IP (and probably the link layer as well to get the NAT material) and networks in general to fully appreciate the matieral. Overall, a great book.

To know details on load balancers, this is the one!!
Compared with Tony Bourke's book, this one depicts more on technical details such as how packets flow, how health check is done and etc.. On the other hand, Bourke's book mentions more about the basic concept and the introduction to current available products.

If you are interested in how load balancers are designed, this is the right book for you. However, if you are just shopping around and only want to know what load balancers are, get Brouke's one.

Btw, I was a bit disappointed at chapter 9. I expected to see more opinions on the future development of load balancers but it was not mentioned too much.

Wonderful
I am fairly new to load balancing, and this book provided an almost perfect introduction to the topic.

From a technical writing point-of-view, this is probably one of the best written books I have ever come across. The chapters are well organzied and are fairly easy to follow. Complex topics are clearly explained. The use of diagrams is very good as well.

If you want to learn more about load balancing, buy this book.